User blog:Scrav/ERB Reviews - John Lennon vs Bill O'Reilly
First of all, I'm aware this isn't a rap battle. I'm still too poor to make them but that should change soon. This series is one I've had in mind for a while so I decided that I should probably release some kind of content to keep anyone interested occupied. Needless to say, I slaved away for about 7-8 hours non-stop working on this so I'd appreciate some feedback. Thanks! Also, I WILL still be producing this series after I start making rap battles too, as long as it gets generally good feedback from you guys. Video Transcript for those who, understandably, can't hear a word I'm saying. I hope you know the definition of the word “opinion” because I’m about to review an ERB video on the wiki for ERB. Please don’t kill me. I just re-watched John Lennon vs Bill O’Reilly and considering it was created when Nice Peter and Epic Lloyd were only just beginning to experiment with the series we know and love, it was impressive. They were on a low budget and they didn’t really know where they wanted to take the project but what they did produce must have had something going for it because it’s got almost 11 million subscribers and a wiki. I mean, come on, we are the best wiki, right? Right? Needless to say I’m not going be as judgmental as I normally would be. Shall we start? Yeah, why not? The Lyrics Just a heads up: when I mean lyrics I mean the words AND the way they’re being delivered by the rappers. Ok? While I don’t know a whole lot about Bill O’Reilly I found both his and John’s lyrics to be relevant and they had a very nice flow to them. I noticed that John Lennon used a lot of Beatles song titles in his lyrics and personally I find that to be a cheap way to come up with lines and I don’t really like it. As for the delivery of the lyrics there was one glaring issue: Nice Peter was rapping in an American accent. I hope I don’t need to tell you why that’s a goof. It’s not like the budget was too low for him to rap in an English accent and as we can tell from Doc Brown vs Doctor Who he can imitate such an accent just fine. Even if the accent wasn’t Liverpudlian I would have settled for it. So while there were a couple of fairly big mistakes that they easily could have avoided, overall, I found the lyrics to be pretty spot-on and burn-tastic in their own right. Lyrics of this calibre are a good thing for such an early battle to have. After careful consideration I’m giving the lyrics a 7/10. The Beat Here’s the thing. I can’t review the beat the same way I review other aspects of the battle because they don’t make the beats, they choose them. So whenever I’m reviewing the beat I’ll be focusing more on how it relates to the context of the battle than how good it is. The beat for this battle had pretty much no relation to either of the rappers but its minor tonality and hard-hitting bass and drums fit well with the fact that this battle is somewhat more serious, hostile and realistic than most, given that the two rappers have legitimate reasons to have opposed each other in real life, even if they didn’t. However I still feel that they could have easily used a beat with a resemblance to Beatles music or at least generic music from that era. The beat’s only just getting 7/10. The Video I’m not sure whether to criticize Peter and Lloyd for not including subtitles in the video for this battle. On the one hand they clearly had software to do it and from the next episode onwards they included subtitles, but on the other hand it makes a significant amount of sense that they didn’t include them if they weren’t sure if this was to become a series yet, so I’m going to be generous and not let the absence of subtitles affect the final score or the final final score. You’ll understand later. It’s fully excusable that they didn’t have the static backgrounds they tend to have now because those backgrounds are actually designed by someone specifically for the battle and that costs money! However they still presented the visual side of this battle uniquely in that they partially made it look like a news report. But even though the ticker tape and fake logos did make me laugh they distracted me from a lot of the battle so I can see why they discontinued that idea. They did fairly well with the costumes considering their budget (that wig though) and although there was an inconsistency between the lyrics and the video regarding the costumes (see if you can spot it for yourself) I was considerably impressed by the video given the circumstances. I’m giving the video a 7/10. Conclusion So if we do the maths, 7 plus 7 plus 7 divided by 3 is… 7. Well, that concludes the first video in this series. If you’re wondering why I’m even doing this it’s so that I can be producing SOMETHING until I've started producing actual rap battles which, as I've explained before, will take longer than it would for most people. Thanks for watching. Category:Blog posts